ns-3 monthly report

March 2007

Prepared by: Tom Henderson

This document is available at http://www.nsnam.org

Table of Contents


1.   Introduction

This monthly report summarizes the ns-3 project, a collaborative project funded under the following grants:

  • NSF CNS-0551686 (University of Washington);   PIs: Tom Henderson and Sumit Roy
  • NSF CNS-0551378 (Georgia Institute of Technology);   PI: George Riley
  • NSF CNS-0551706 (International Computer Science Institute);  PI: Sally Floyd
For more information and to participate in the project, see http://www.nsnam.org.

1.1 News and Highlights

  • A first developer's snapshot release of ns-3 was announced to the ns-developers list on March 31. This release is an early release, not a full pre-alpha release, but intended to illustrate some emerging design patterns for ns-3.
  • We made a maintenance release of ns-2 (ns-2.31) on March 10. This release featured changes to the WPAN module, fixes to allow ns to compile on Solaris with a Sun C compiler, and changes to the PackMime HTTP module for improved HTTP 1.1 behavior.

1.2 Contributions and Collaborations

We regularly collaborate with the Planete research group at INRIA Sophia Antipolis. Mathieu Lacage is the lead developer.

1.3 Statistics

2.   ns-3 Development

2.1 Release Schedule

The project made a snapshot release on March 31, and envisions the next release to be in late April. Key architectural issues and interfaces are still being worked out. The core development team plans an offsite meeting in April to resolve the open issues.

2.2 Technical Progress

The core development team focused on enabling a simple simulation script, found in the examples/simple-p2p.cc file. This example is a clone of the ns-2 "simple.tcl" script, and involves four nodes interconnected by three point-to-point links, with simple application traffic traversing the links.

The exercise of enabling a running simulation revealed that there remain several open issues regarding low-level memory management architecture, node architecture, and architecture for reusable simulation components that need finalization. The goal of the next release (end-of-April) is to resolve these open issues.

2.3 Actions and Open Issues

We started in October to track open issues and bugs in a Bugzilla tracker: http://www.nsnam.org/bugzilla. So far, this tracker has not been really used. There is a separate ns-3 wiki issues list

3.   ns-2 Maintenance

The project is maintaining ns-2, nam-1, otcl, and tclcl while ns-3 is being developed.

3.1 Release Schedule

As mentioned above, the ns-2.31 release was made on March 10. New in ns-2.31:

  • several changes/fixes to the WPAN module, from Iyappan Ramachandra
  • various patches to allow ns to compile on Solaris with Sun C compiler, courtesy of Emil Mikulic and Michele Weigle
  • changes to the PackMimeHTTP module for improved HTTP/1.1 behavior, from Michele Weigle
  • additional TCP maintenance from Sally Floyd
  • nam-1 relicensing (GPL-compliant)
  • support for building on newer OS distributions/compilers

There are no specific plans yet for ns-2.32, but June (quarterly releases) is an assumed target.

3.2 Technical Progress

Nothing major to report in March.

3.3 Actions and Open Issues

The below are the major action items and open issues.

relicense nam-1
Owner: Tom H. (with support from John H.)
Description: Align all nam licenses to be GPL-compatible.
Status: Finished with ns-2.31 release (March 2007)

ns-2 validation problems
Owner: None.
Description: Certain validation tests have been failing on various platforms (Cygwin, Fedora Linux) while passing on FreeBSD for several release versions.
Status: Cygwin and 64-bit Linux are the main open issues right now.